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In 1923, America paid close attention, via special radio broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and cover stories in popular magazines, as a government party descended the Colorado to survey Grand Canyon. Fifty years after John Wesley Powell's journey, the canyon still had an aura of mystery and extreme danger. At one point, the party was thought lost in a flood. Something important besides adventure was going on. Led by Claude Birdseye and including colorful characters such as early river-runner Emery Kolb, popular writer Lewis Freeman, and hydraulic engineer Eugene La Rue, the expedition not only made the first accurate survey of the river gorge but sought to decide the canyon's fate. The primary goal was to determine the best places to dam the Grand. With Boulder Dam not yet built, the USGS, especially La Rue, contested with the Bureau of Reclamation over how best to develop the Colorado River. The survey party played a major role in what was known and thought about Grand Canyon. The authors weave a narrative from the party's firsthand accounts and frame it with a thorough history of water politics and development and the Colorado River. The recommended dams were not built, but the survey both provided base data that stood the test of time and helped define Grand Canyon in the popular imagination. Also by Robert Webb: Lee's Ferry
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“A convincing case for Powell’s legacy as a pioneering conservationist.”--The Wall Street Journal "A bold study of an eco-visionary at a watershed moment in US history."--Nature A timely, thrilling account of the explorer who dared to lead the first successful expedition down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon—and waged a bitterly-contested campaign for sustainability in the West. John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition—starving, battered, and nearly naked—they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before. With The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John F. Ross tells how that perilous expedition launched the one-armed Civil War hero on the path to becoming the nation’s foremost proponent of environmental sustainability and a powerful, if controversial, visionary for the development of the American West. So much of what he preached—most broadly about land and water stewardship—remains prophetically to the point today.
Photographs made in Grand Canyon a century ago may provide us today with a sense of history; photographs made a century later from the same vantage points give us a more precise picture of change in this seemingly timeless place. Between 1889 and 1890, Robert Brewster Stanton made photographs every 1-2 miles through the river corridor for the purpose of planning a water-level railroad route and produced the largest collection of photographs of the Colorado River at one point in time. Robert Webb, a USGS hydrologist conducting research on debris flows in the Canyon, obtained the photographs and from 1989 to 1995 replicated all 445 of the views captured by Stanton, matching as closely as possible the original camera positions and lighting conditions. Grand Canyon, a Century of Change assembles the most dramatic of these paired photographs to demonstrate both the persistence of nature and the presence of humanity. Unexpected longevity of some plant species, effects of animal grazing, and expansion of cacti are all captured by the replicate photographs. More telling is evidence of the impact of Glen Canyon Dam: increased riparian vegetation, new marshes, aggraded debris fans, and eroded sand bars. In the accompanying text, Webb provides a thorough analysis of what each pair of photographs shows and places the project in its historical context. Complementing his narrative are six sidebar articles by authorities on Canyon natural history that further attest to a century of change. The level of detail obtained from the photographs represents one of the most extensive long-term monitoring efforts ever conducted in a national park; it is the most detailed documentation effort ever performed using repeat photography. Much more than simply a picture book, Grand Canyon, a Century of Change is an environmental history of the river corridor, a fascinating book that clearly shows the impact of human influence on Grand Canyon and warns us that its future is very much in our hands.
The classic geological study of the Grand Canyon, commissioned by the fledgling U.S. Geological Survey, is admired today as much for its literary qualities as for its scientific value.
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Seeing Things Whole presents the essence of the extraordinary legacy that John Wesley Powell has left to the American people, and to people everywhere who strive to reconcile the demands of society with the imperatives of the land.